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Shaquille O’Neal, the Big Retiree

With Wednesday’s announcement that he is retiring, Shaquille O’Neal leaves behind a legacy far beyond that of his four titles, 15 All-Star Game nods, MVP award, and fifth-place standing on the all-time scoring list. He may or may not have been the NBA’s best big man ever, but Shaq leaves the game with an outsized personality that basketball may never see again. Yes, there are plenty of quirky, fun players in today’s NBA, but none back it up with total domination of the game like Shaq did in his prime. And none did it in a 7-foot-1, 330-pound frame. Even as far back as 1991, when he was a sophomore center at Louisiana State known as The Shack, Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick saw something special in O’Neal. “It’s hardly astonishing that [he] is so young, so big, so good or even so mature, composed and polite,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “The surprise is that he’s all of those things at once.”

O’Neal retires having spent his last season as a Boston Celtic. He played in a total of 37 games, was hobbled with injuries for most of the year, and had career-lows in both scoring and rebounds. He played 12 minutes in the playoffs and scored two points. But Boston will remember him as someone who worked his way into the fabric of the city in short time, conducting the Boston Pops and visiting a nursing home to watch a Celtics game with 30 residents. It was sweet, of course, but a far cry from his early, dominant days when he made a name for himself on the court.

After being selected with the first pick overall by the Orlando Magic in 1992, Shaq hit the ground running, averaging 23.4 points and 13.9 rebounds in his rookie year. He would win two scoring titles in his career and lead the league in field goal percentage 10 times (he finishes his career ranked second all-time). But it was his seamless integration into pop culture that boosted Shaq from beyond just a great basketball player into the realm of pop culture icon. “No athlete ever blended such dominance and such charisma,” Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski writes. “As much as anything, he was a force of nature.” On June 4, 1993, after his rookie year ended, Shaq made his rap debut on the Fu-Schnickens single “What’s Up Doc? (Can We Rock).” The song went gold. Four months later, he released his solo album, Shaq Diesel. It sold over 1 million copies and was certified platinum. Two singles made the top 50 on the Billboard charts, including the immortal “(I Know I Got) Skillz.”

The next year, “Shaq-Fu: Da Return” hit shelves; it went gold. Two more albums followed. A third, “Shaquille O’Neal Presents His Superfriends, Vol. 1,” was pushed back and eventually shuttered completely. MTV included it alongside unreleased Neil Young and Prince albums as one of five legendary albums never to have been released.

“Tim Duncan might have been as good at what he did as Shaq was, but who would you rather hang out with if you had a free Friday night?” ESPN’s Michael Wilbon asks. “Shaq was so damn dominant as a basketball player that his silliness didn’t detract from his greatness.” Still, the Big Aristotle/Shamrock/Deporter/Baryshnikov/Maravich/Diesel (all self-anointed nicknames) wasn’t universally adored. Many detractors said that his off-court pursuits were distractions from what could have been an even more dominant career. Dave D’Alessandro of the Star-Ledger became one of the loudest anti-Shaq voices on Wednesday, panning O’Neal for his various transgressions—trashing Kobe Bryant in a rap song, calling Mike Bibby a Cub Scout, unfairly skewering Stan van Gundy—and painted him as a hubristic bully who developed a pattern of belittling his peers. “The kid from Newark was Superman,” D’Alessandro writes. “The only problem was he had no mild-mannered, Clark Kentian alter ego.” Even D’Alessandro, though, couldn’t question Shaq without heaping on some praise, calling him the “most perfect and dominant big man in NBA history,” and highlighting charity works that O’Neal has pursued in the last few years in his hometown of Newark.

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For casual fans of hockey just now tuning in, Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals couldn’t have been a more exciting introduction to the Bruins and Canucks. The game was scoreless until Vancouver’s Raffi Torres put a shot behind Boston goaltender Tim Thomas with 18.5 seconds left in the game, giving Vancouver a 1-0 win and a 1-0 lead in the finals. The major story from this game, though, may come from an incident at the end of the first period, when Vancouver’s Alex Burrows allegedly bit the finger of Boston’s Patrice Bergeron.

Jarkko Ruutu incurred a suspension two years ago for a biting incident. But ESPN’s James Murphy points out that the NHL’s stance on biting is more varied than one would expect. “Bruins forward Marc Savard got one game after biting Toronto forward Darcy Tucker in 2003,” Murphy notes, “but Philadelphia’s Scott Hartnell escaped a suspension early last season because of lack of evidence on an alleged bite of Pittsburgh defenseman Kris Letang after both players fell to the ice in a scrum.” After the game, Burrows seemed unsure as to whether or not he bit Bergeron. Asked if he clamped down, he vaguely denied it. “He had his fingers in my mouth,” Burrows told reporters, “but I don’t think I bit him.” Bergeron, however, had a different story. “We were speaking French, me and him, and I asked him, ‘Why did you do that?’” Bergeron told Jim Jamieson of The Province, “And his explanation was that I put my finger in his mouth so he had to do it.”

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Colorado Rockies pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez started the 2010 season on fire. He threw a no-hitter in April and had racked up 15 wins by the All-Star Break. 2011 has been much crueler to the righty. He entered Wednesday night’s game with a 5.86 ERA. He had allowed four or more earned runs in five of his nine starts. But on Wednesday, after watching tape from last season, Jimenez was masterful, shutting out the Dodgers in a complete game four-hitter, earning his first win on the season. He was 10-1 at this point last year.

“A year ago, Ubaldo Jimenez wasn’t throwing fastballs so much as he was spreading pixie dust. The first half of his 2010 season was more like an amusement ride,” the Denver Post’s Jim Armstrong writes. “Jimenez’s [2011] season has been a case study in erratic ways.”

And he’s not alone, joining Chris Carpenter and Jo-Jo Reyes as this year’s one-win wonders, according to USA Today’s Paul White. In fact, just one pitcher who qualifies for the ERA race remains winless on the season: the Chicago White Sox’s John Danks, who sits at 0-8. “And now Danks will have to wait a little longer,” White writes. “A shuffling of Chicago’s six-man rotation had Danks and Jake Peavy swapping turns, so Danks won’t pitch again until Monday.”

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